The key facts

  • Poet Yevgeny Chigrin has died at the age of 65; the cause was cancer in its final stage
  • The illness lasted three years; relatives said doctors had given up on him and complications set in
  • Chigrin was the author of the books Hanging Cinemas, Water Trees, The Invisible Guide and others, and a member of the PEN Club and the Moscow Union of Writers

Death of the poet

Poet Yevgeny Chigrin has died at the age of 65. His relatives told RIA Novosti about his death, as reported by Gazeta.Ru. “It’s true. Zhenya passed away this morning,” the poet’s family told the agency.

Cause of death

The cause of death was cancer. According to his relatives, Chigrin had the final stage of cancer, which he had been fighting for three years. “The doctors had already given up on him — and, accordingly, complications set in, and today he died suddenly”, the agency’s source said.

Biography and work

Chigrin was born on September 16, 1961, in Ukraine. His childhood was spent in Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and from 2002 he lived in Moscow and in Krasnogorsk, in the Moscow region. His books include Hanging Cinemas, Water Trees, The Invisible Guide, The Underwater Sphere, The Sleepless Bay and The Driver. The poet was a member of the international PEN Club and the Moscow Union of Writers, and a laureate of international and domestic prizes. His poems were published in the magazines Novy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, Kontinent, Zvezda, Neva, Arion, Interpoeziya, Vestnik Evropy and Yunost, among other publications, as well as in European and Russian anthologies. Chigrin’s works were translated into Spanish, French, English, Polish, Romanian and other languages.

Context

Gazeta.Ru also recalls that Soviet ballerina Irina Gensler passed away earlier. Chigrin’s death is a notable loss for contemporary Russian poetry: he belonged to key professional communities — the PEN Club and the Moscow Union of Writers — and his texts were published in leading literary magazines and translated into several European languages, which speaks to recognition both in Russia and abroad.